Shared Strength

The other day, I was reading an obituary for a sweet soul that was taken, from my vantage point, far too soon.  As I sat in quiet reflection, I began to contemplate the words that he might have said if he was given the opportunity to address the people at his own funeral.  Would his words be filled with counsel of leaving things undone, unsaid or spending too much time worrying about things beyond ones control ?   Would they be filled with thanks, like an Oscar Award winner, professing love and gratitude to all?  Or would they be filled with no words at all, just warm embraces and soft kisses to those left behind?   I tend to lea n towards thinking it would be the latter .   I believe that a million words cannot express the emotions of t he touch of love, but what happens when we have neither ?  T o re-ask it like the late J immy Ruffin, "What becomes of the broken - hearted .  Who had love that's now departed?"  The pain in th is ...

Last night, I awoke in the middle of the night.  Not to startling sound, or to noises unknown, but rather to an overwhelming feeling of joy.  I awoke happy, oddly enough .   H appy at the blessing of a family sleeping safely in the home we share.  And as I stood quietly watching them in gentle slumber a song came into my head .  It is a bluegrass song and it goes as follows:  A Simple Life ~ Ricky Skaggs I live a simple life A good coat when the cold winds bite Leather boots for my bare feet Now and then a steak to eat I pick with the boys on Friday night So I live a simple life   My favorite book was wrote about a man that died to save my soul And my favorite thing to hear is Daddy I’m so glad you home And my favorite woman is 5’3” with long black hair and green eyes Still I live a simple life   I live a simple life Couple of friends I really like A little house outside of town An old car that gets me around Complicat...

Where is the wisdom that is lost in knowledge?  Where is the knowledge that is lost in information?  CS Lewis wrote these words and they are as true today as they were then.  In a world so filled with information available to us at breakneck pace it is hard to imagine living a day where we were cutoff from it.  In a world where technology so freely gives us the tantalizing, the lucrative, the creative and the answers, I ask, where is the work?  One of my earliest memories of my own Father is being in the front yard while he and my uncle worked on a stock car that they were tuning up for the weekend race.  Meticulously he worked to achieve the best balance, if successful it meant a chance for the win, if not, it meant a tow home and trip back to the drawing board.  This was a simple hobby, but it was clear to me even as a child that this was an example of a man's quest for wisdom.  To know of something through his...

The supervisor of the crew operated the large compactor with a degree of control that can only be obtained with much practice.  Dressed in uniforms reminiscent of long ago, their dark green pants and light green shirts made me think of how Grandpa probably looked when he was a young man working a shovel in San Diego.  The crew worked and operated in a sense of reverent efficiency that would have made my Aunt proud.  As I stood there watching the operator compacting this dirt I could not help but think of my Aunt standing in this same spot as a 34 year old mother of four watching this same dirt be placed over her first love.  Staring at the beautifully etched stone chosen with the image of the Los Angeles Temple where they made promises to live eternally together.  The pain that she must have experienced as she looked at the blank side of that stone. Returning alone to the life they had built together, to a pillow that once held his head and to step forward as a ...

I wrote this in honor of my Aunt, on Wednesday, on a flight down to San Jose.  I will miss her forever and hope that her life can be remember for what it was, a great success story.  Further proof of the power of the human spirit. --- Wednesday I awoke at 3:30am to catch a flight to San Jose to meet a customer.  As I sat in the airport waiting for my flight I learned that my Aunt Eva had passed away earlier that morning.  She had heart issues yesterday and was rushed to the hospital after her heart suddenly stopped on a trip to take my Grandmother to a Doctors appointment.  On Tuesday they said she should be fine and that it was fortunate that it happened at a medical office, but shortly after midnight her beautiful heart beat one last beat.  One last brush stroke on one of Heavenly Father's great masterpieces.  My Aunt Eva was a special woman, with a heart and mind turned towards kindness and compassion.  She was pregnant very young and wa...

My Dad sent this to me today and I love it and wanted to share it.  Harvey Mackay is one of my favorite leadership writers.  In my life, I have really grown to appreciate my parents way of helping me grow as a person.   I was just thinking about this just yesterday when Owen stopped his bike on a hill and could not get back going again.  I gave him a gentle push and slowly let go and he was off.  I have never felt more pride than I did in watching him climb the rest of the way by himself.  I could care less that I helped him get going, or that he shouldn't have stopped in the first place.  What I care about is that he has the internal drive to keep charging ahead in spite of prior adversity or failure.  My Mom and Dad have always been there to straighten me out, dust me off and give me a gentle push in the right direction.  The rest then becomes up to me.  So my wish is that we may each have something to do that makes us bette...

I like most have not been looking forward to turning 30. Sure, it is just another age and they say all the best stuff happens in your 30s. But it is hard to say goodbye to an entire decade worth of living. But now that it is here and is not going anywhere, I welcome you with open arms all years between 30-39. I look forward to them being the culmination of seeds planted in my twenties. But before I close the door on my 20's I thought it best to take an account of the important things that happened each year. 20: College at WSU, the Cougs went to the Rose Bowl. What a great year to be in a college town! 21: Graduated from college and moved to Bangkok, Thailand for an internship. Worked for an oil refinery and learned a new language completely out of necessity. It was the year that I learned that a person is capable, if willing, of accomplishing, Hard things. 22: First real job as a manager at a FedEx facility in Burlington, WA. Learned what hard physical work is all a...

Well, I did not blog too much about the days leading up to my surgery. I guess there was just too much that preoccupied me in the fall :) Below I am going to give a synopsis of the events leading up to my surgery as they pertain to having children. But before I start, I will spoil the ending Erin is pregnant with our 2nd and she is at 12 weeks of nausea and fatigued bliss...I feel like I am more empathetic to her plight this time around!! But Erin is a trooper and will get through this swimmingly. So last year before going into surgery my Doctor broke the news to me that my sperm are surely no good and that future children would be very difficult. This was a very difficult time for me as just about 4 months earlier Erin and I had been talking about having another child, but I dismissed it as the wrong time with job challenges in Medford etc...Even though that in my heart I felt that it was the right time. So now, sitting in this Doctors office I felt a overwhelming sense of of ...

Well, I am excited to be feeling completely normal again. I have found myself increasing my desire to be healthy over the past couple months and have decided to start on a new quest. I am going to call it a quest for the the mountain top. You see I have learned a valuable lesson over the past 9 months and that is that our bodies have an incredible ability to heal themselves if we are willing to lend a hand. So I am on an effort to get back to climbing shape and I will work over this winter to be ready to hike up Mt Adams again this summer as well as one more mountain to be named later. I will probably make a bit of a charity hike out of it to do something nice for Providence Oncology. I am thankful for Mt Adams because most of my strength to fight cancer came from this adventure. I learned the ability to overcome comes one step at a time. It is a lesson that I probably would have overlooked had I not had cancer this year, but now I get to keep it and pass it along to anyone wh...